1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to grouping communications and more specifically to creating threads from communications of varying modalities.
2. Introduction
When receiving large amounts of texts, emails, and other forms of communication, organizing the information in a meaningful way becomes difficult. A simple solution is to organize folders, or directories, of communications from a particular individual or regarding a particular topic. This solution, however, becomes ineffective when applied to communications from a variety of different modalities.
The wide variety of modalities used in modern communications further complicate this problem. A non-exhaustive list of communication modalities includes email, Twitter, texting or Short Message Service (SMS) communications, voicemail, events or event planning, video chat, instant messaging, phone conversations, social media based messages, and others. Often users shift from one modality to another in a single conversation, or users switch modalities multiple times within the conversation. In another situation, a single conversation may run in parallel through differing modalities.
In single modalities, the technology of threading has emerged, where a computing device processes the communications and organizes them according to a common theme or a common line of discussion. These organized units are termed threads, and a user can then access the thread to view all the related communications. However, these threads are limited to a single communication modality. Software can organize communications of a single modality into threads, but in a situation with different modalities the user has no option but to manually organize or search through multiple messages and modalities. This is a lengthy and time-consuming process. An improved means for organizing communications of different modalities is needed.